Perhaps the series will be 4* overall - I feel like this one wasnt quite as entertaining as when we first met teen Rin but still dramatic and fun like a soap opera ( )

More realistic than other such stories, yet did not recover from the jump of ten years at the start of the previous volume that necessitated the use of some beaten manga clichés. ( )

Good series, bad ending ( )

This is an awkward volume for Bunny Drop, which does so well in depicting family relationships, different aspects of growing up, and all of it in a fresh and rather unique way. This sixth installment shies away from all those things and embraces the cliché of high school manga stories. It honestly felt so much more soap opera to me, particularly in contrast to the rest of the series.

That's not to say this is a skippable volume. It does a lot to bring closure to the missing years that were jumped over between volumes 4 and 5, and it develops the characters and their relationships further. It's also incredibly important for making volume 5 feel cohesive - I believe that 5 & 6 create a story arc and are best read together. But could this story arc be told in a different and less clichéd way? Perhaps it could have...

The story in these chapters has two primary functions, from what I can tell. 1) It ties up the potential relationships between the Nitanis and Rin and Daikichi, and 2) explains what happened in middle school to strain Rin and Kouki's friendship, as we saw in volume 5. There is actually very little of Daikichi in the volume, considering he's one of the two main characters, though his appearances contain rather a lot of character establishment, considering. I particularly enjoyed the way he interacts with Kouki, like a long-suffering father or uncle.

I wasn't sure about the second half of this series when I started it in volume 5, thinking it was a bit all over the place and not really a good match for the first half. But with volume 6, it seems clear that we're now reading a different type of story (or, at least, story arc) that transitions us to a new stage in Rin and Daikichi's lives. This transition and the story structure becomes more clear in volume 7. ( )